With Rohit Negi, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi.
Part of the Environment and Society Seminar Series.
China and India’s air pollution problem has occupied significant technoscientific, state and public interest in the past decade. A popular reading of the issue sees it as a cataclysmic crisis event, an airpocalypse requiring immediate attention. Interventions, in this rendering, must be urgent and decisive. Given its toxic air, Delhi is central to these discussions just as air-talk is constitutive of the urban debate in the city. Delhi has, in effect, become a laboratory to test everything from monitoring devices, air quality models, smog towers, and experiments in pollution governance. It is also a place where different forms of technoscientific practice are being discussed, critiqued, and revised.
This talk will expand on the reconfigurations of air pollution technosciences, showing how questions around self-reliance, public understanding, relations with the state, and blindspots are being debated and acted on alongside concerns of democracy and justice. It views these negotiations as crucial for environmental practice in the region and beyond well after the airpocalypse.
Rohit Negi is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Director of the Centre for Community Knowledge at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi. He is the co-author of ‘Atmosphere of Collaboration: Air Pollution Science, Politics, and Ecopreneurship in Delhi’ (Routledge, 2021). Rohit has published on urban environments across geographies in Geoforum, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Contemporary South Asia, Journal of Southern African Studies, and Urbanisation.
Rohit Negi is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Director of the Centre for Community Knowledge at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi. He is the co-author of ‘Atmosphere of Collaboration: Air Pollution Science, Politics, and Ecopreneurship in Delhi’ (Routledge, 2021). Rohit has published on urban environments across geographies in Geoforum, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Contemporary South Asia, Journal of Southern African Studies, and Urbanisation.
Please contact sue.davis@nottingham.ac.uk for the link